UF faculty and students are creating a new operating system to protect against dangerous software.
The new operating system is named Chameleon because it changes and adapts to defend a computer when potentially damaging programs come through. UF researchers have been working on the system for about a year and a half, said Ruimin Sun, one of the project researchers.
UF is also working with Stony Brook University in New York and the University of California, Davis, to create the system, she said.
Sun, a UF electrical and computer engineering doctoral candidate, said she wants the system to be able to protect itself against harmful software.
“It can be unpredictable, so we want to be unpredictable as well,” Sun said.
While other operating systems will shut down unknown software programs in which they can’t distinguish what’s harmless and dangerous, Chameleon allows the software to continue running so the operating system can collect information on the program, Sun said.
Chameleon can also detect harmful programs disguised as normal software and trace them back to their sources, she said.
Sun said she’ll work on the project during the next two years of her doctoral program, but Chameleon could take 10 to 20 years to complete.
Andrew Lee, a UF statistics senior, said he’s been running tests for Chameleon since his computer security professor asked for volunteers last year.
The 21-year-old said cyber security is important because computer users face risks such as having their password stolen, losing money and having private information leaked.
“It just affects every age demographic and age group,” Lee said. “You have 12-year-olds who are just learning the computer, and you have 65-year-olds who don’t know how to use a computer.”
Every computer with Chameleon will be different, he said, because the operating system will adapt to protect each computer based on the user’s threats.
“We’re kind of entering this era where everything is personalized and everything is tailored to you,” he said. “You have Siri, which kind of knows your schedule, and you have Google Now, which reads your email and tries to give you suggestions.”
Chameleon’s ability to transform itself could stop the spread of dangerous programs, he said. Most computers have similar operating systems, so if someone can attack one computer, he or she can attack many.
“If you make that one computer variable different from every other computer, suddenly their job as an attacker becomes a lot more difficult,” Lee said.
